Friday, 3 July 2015

Circassian Beauty and monstrous commodification

Is all commodification and trade in people a process of making monstrous? For Linda Frost, the immigrant woman who escapes working class drudgery might "join the market of commodified bodies in the American freak show." (R.G. Thomson, 1996: 260)

The Circassian beauty, procured as one might buy a slave by P.T. Barnum, was a common exhibit among the “oddities and amusements” of the legendary showman.

In effect, Robert Bogdan has argued that the 1864 exhibition “launched the prototype of a self-made freak”; the "Circassian Beauty" was a “creation that wove the history of science together with tales of erotic intrigue from Asia Minor, current events, and a good portion of showman hype.” (1988: 237-9)

Furthermore, Linda Frost has concluded that The Circassian Beauty “depicts a harem slave who is reenslaved into Victorian American domesticity, only again to be enslaved as a sexualized immigrant commodity of public entertainment, a force that likes women and cultural others beautifully caged.” (in R.G. Thomson, 1996: 260)

The images need to be understood within their function as performances of assumed identities and cultural projections, and within their wider frames of presentation, as entertainment, edification and ideological instruction. The images in their own right sometimes suggest both the seduction of enigma and the cryptic, alongside the power wielded by the observer's enactment of reading and sense of a truth revealed in the present moment of the spectacle that exceeds its time and space.

According to James W. Cook, Barnum's use of the "nondescript" rather than "Negro" ... "provided white mid-century New Yorkers with an arena in which to talk openly about black people, often in brutally dehumanizing ways --- to glide seamlessly between straightforward physical description and gross cultural caricature..." In this light, Barnum's 1860 offering was "a staged hybridity in many ways more cruel and dehumanizing even than the minstrel show's brand of racial caricature." (in R.G. Thomson, 1996: 149)

Further Reading

Adams, Rachel. Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American cultural imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Adams, Bluford. E pluribus Barnum: The great showman and the making of US popular culture. U of Minnesota Press, 1997.